Pope says June meeting with Russian Orthodox Patriarch suspended
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VATICAN CITY, April 22 (Reuters) – Plans for Pope Francis to meet in Jerusalem in June with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, who has backed Russia’s war in Ukraine, have been suspended, the pope has told an Argentine newspaper.
Reuters reported on April 11 that the Vatican was considering extending the pope’s trip to Lebanon on June 12-13 by a day so that he could meet with Kirill on June 14 in Jerusalem.
Francis told La Nacion in an interview that he regretted that the plan had to be “suspended” because Vatican diplomats advised that such a meeting “could lend itself to much confusion at this moment”.
It would have been only their second meeting. Their first, in Cuba in 2016, was the first between a pope and a leader of the Russian Orthodox Church since the Great Schism that split Christianity into Eastern and Western branches in 1054.
Kirill, 75, has given his full-throated blessing for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a position that has splintered the worldwide Orthodox Church and unleashed an internal rebellion that theologians and academics say is unprecedented.
The 85-year-old Francis has several times implicitly criticised Russia and President Vladimir Putin over the war, using terms such as unjustified aggression and invasion and lamenting atrocities against civilians.
Putin, a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, has described Moscow’s actions as a “special military operation” in Ukraine designed not to occupy territory but to demilitarise and “denazify” the country.
